OH, THIS URGE SERVES ME WELL
compulsion, the universe contracts and folds in on itself / doe, wide-eyed disbelief / great divine mystery / elusive truth, disguised in the breeze / constantly changing, just to say the same thing
The air – feels wrong. No, maybe not wrong. Wrong is probably the wrong word. It’s right, but it wouldn’t be right anywhere else.
This island feels unnatural. I can’t tell if it feels unnatural in a way that is good or bad – I think it might be neither. I can feel it all the way down to my soul, which seems to shiver where it is nestled in my breast. It seems to burn.
I have lived and lived and lived again. Perhaps that is why the images in the mirrors do not frighten me at all.
From where I am standing, I can see my other two equine-selves on either side; the green knight, plain and pale, clothed in emerald armor, and the near-dead, like pale sun-rays, a sword at her hip. Beneath me is my own reflection - Nicnevin’s reflection. All of these faces are mine, or they were, but there is something alien about seeing the two dead ones staring at me, catching my eye just as I look into theirs.
There is nothing like looking at them to know that I am not them. Not now. Not ever again. I’ve never mourned for it – but looking at them now, like walking corpses, I almost feel sorry for the ends of the lives they lived.
But only almost. It is the natural way; there is nothing else.
I am descending – ascending, moving in some direction that is near-incomprehensible because, wherever I look, there are mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors, reflecting the impossible, reflecting each other – deeper and deeper into a labyrinthian, unrecognizable expanse. In front of me the landscape opens up, and I can see a massive chunk of crystal which seems to be ripped directly out of another world; I stare into it and realize that I am staring into the great, autumnal expanse of my homeland, and there is a man with golden laurels twined into his hair (only gilded leaves – never a crown for you), working a blade across the bone-hilt of a sword. He scrawls designs in shallow divots; they unwind across the bleached ivory, forming the shapes of oak leaves and strangling vines, of firefly gleam and swirling wind. I walk towards the reflection, closer and closer and closer, until my muzzle is all but pressed to the surface – all but fogging up the glass.
Oh, old friend. I know you. I know parts of you; but I’ve nearly forgotten your face, and now, all but turned away from me, neck bent in work, gold leaf falling into your eyes – I still can’t see it.
I take a deep breath and press my nose to the crystal, and I find it warm and honey-scented – like home. The wind blows through autumnal branches, and I can almost hear it, I can almost remember it, but the sound never comes, and neither does the breeze in my hair. He looks up, slowly, his eyes a color I won’t remember as soon as I look away from him. He looks confused – there is no gleam of recognition in his gaze.
I smile, slowly, and I see his eyes widen.
I turn away.
I walk deeper and deeper into the mass of shards; my reflection is a vine ahead of me, or a lightning bug flying in the opposite direction, or an arrow buried in the shoulder of some warrior from outside of the woods. My mother is a forest cat in the branches of my father’s oak tree, looking down at me with hazy golden eyes, or, in a twirl – a refraction of light – she is herself, but her eyes are that same shade, still feline. Once I look over and my reflection is the same, but my sister, in her owl’s skin and feathers, looks back from where she has coiled her talons in my mane and rest on my neck.
(There are other versions of me, too. I don’t notice them – I don’t notice the ones that are run ragged, or bloody, the one that is teary-eyed where I am smiling. I am too distracted by the wonders to notice the shadows that the island is attempting to show me. All I know is that this place is beautiful and new and wild, so wholly wild, and I am determined to embrace it, just like I am determined to embrace every part - down to the cutting edge - of this new world.)
I breathe deep of winding air – which is cold and sharp, like the crystals, and tastes like something I am just beginning to recognize as winter – and keep walking.
open! ||
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
